In praise of the famous first words in history
By Michael Erard | Published: 2025-02-27 15:30:00 | Source: The Past – Big Think
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More examples of a dying person’s last words — their last words, called “famous” if the speaker was prominent or notable or the words themselves were sarcastic or sarcastic — are recorded in the public record than any child’s first words. In order to balance this, let me suggest some of the first words spoken by young humans that deserve to be better known, if not given pedestals in their own right because, in their own way, they helped make our world.
A good candidate is the first actual word ever recorded from a child. It dates back to 1602 when it was written by a doctor named Jean Herward – writing down every burp, meal, bowel movement and outing in the life of the French crown prince who would grow up to become Louis XIII. According to Hereward’s records, it was eight o’clock in the morning, and a servant was arriving at the palace for work when the child screamed heOr “Hello.”
Héroard is not classified he First word, though. He’d saved this for an exchange months earlier when a wet nurse teased the prince: “Well, sir, when I’m old and carry a wand, will you love me more?” The baby said, “No” – which should have been just a burp or babble given that the baby was only four months old and too young to know what that meant.
If 1602 seems relatively late for someone to record a baby’s first word, given that human babies have been producing them for hundreds of thousands of years, then I’d agree. The first word may have been mentioned in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Tamil or even Sanskrit, written on an object or surface that had been destroyed or forgotten. I would love to find that.
I know that anticipating a baby’s first word is not universal. And don’t make a fuss about it when it happens because any sustained attention to infants beyond what keeps them alive is not an intrinsic part of parenting. In many societies, other milestones, such as patience, genealogical reading, or even laughter, take precedence over linguistic achievements. For most of human history, parents, especially mothers, had more important things to do than monitor their children for language abilities. Thus, it is not surprising that the first recorded word I have found came from the royal court.
Another famous first word is an old word, bekoswhich I hesitate to care about because it’s not an actual first word. However, it does show that the ancients were aware of children’s linguistic threshold, and certainly recognized that young children could speak. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Egyptian pharaoh Psammetikos I, who lived from 664 to 610 BC, wanted to determine how far back in time his people were. He ordered two children to be raised in isolation, kept safe but never spoken to.
Herodotus wrote: “He wished to listen to these children, as soon as they had finished with the meaningless noise.” the date After hundreds of years, “Which language will they speak first?”
The Pharaoh believed that this would be the original, “natural” language of humanity. As the story goes, after two years, the children reached out to their guardian, the goat herder, and said “pekos.” Psammetichus interpreted this expression as a Phrygian word meaning “bread” and concluded that these people, not the Egyptians, had an older lineage. Pecos In itself it is not as remarkable as its role in a 2,700-year-old tale that has been used to describe ancient attitudes toward children, the linguistic concerns of the Greeks, and the ethics of linguistic experiments involving children.
Among the actual first words, there is another famous word Tima diminutive version of the French salute TIANSIt was spoken by the young French girl Genevieve Tayne, and recorded by her father, the French thinker Hippolyte Tayne. In an article on its linguistic development published in 1877 entitled “On the Acquisition of Language by Children and the Human Species,” he revealed: Timthe word “wonderful” has tremendous parental pride.
“It now means to her ‘give, take, see,’” the father wrote, “indeed she certainly says it several times together in an urgent manner, sometimes because she might have something new to see, sometimes to make us take it, and sometimes to draw attention to herself. All these meanings are mixed in the word Tim“I can feel Tin’s happiness in the way the word represents the ‘outburst of will’ from his daughter. As a father, I shared his sadness when Genevieve stopped saying it. ‘This is no doubt because we did not choose to learn it, it did not agree with any of our ideas… and we did not use it with her and so she stopped using it herself.’
It is not unreasonable for Tien to think that his daughter was summing up the language of the distant past, saying that such a word, loose with meaning and strongly pronounced, is as Neanderthals did. This idea—that children represent early stages of cultural development—was already prominent in biology. Tayne has expanded his scope to include the language of embryology, making… Tim The first word used in an evolutionary argument, it looks into the distant human past.
Tim It is also famous for what it provoked: when Tayne’s essay was translated into English, Charles Darwin published the contents of his diary he kept in 1839 on the development of his son William, which contains another famous first word, mama (meaning “food”). Darwin wrote: “Now instead of beginning to cry when he was hungry, he used this word demonstratively or as a verb, implying ‘Give me food.’”
Darwin’s essay appeared in German, Russian, and English at the same time, creating a transatlantic fad for keeping children’s diaries among natural historians—most of whom were men suddenly visiting home nurseries, taking notes, and publishing diaries.
“The importance of Darwin’s research lay not so much in its content as in the fact that in one fell swoop he made the study of child development a respectable branch of human biology,” Willem Levelt wrote in his book. History of psycholinguistics. The scientific interest in child development sparked by Darwin’s essay gave rise to new sciences of development, new kinds of parenting experiences, and hence obsessive parenting cultures and consumer markets targeted the child’s unique potentialities—and the economic fears and dreams of his or her family.
Most of these memoirs revealed first words that were unusual as words. But let’s be honest: the words your child or children make are the most popular because they are the most popular words. Linguists who track such things say that the top ten most frequently occurring words in the English language are the mom, My door, ball, Farewell, Hello, no, dog, child, Woof woofand banana — although your baby’s first words may vary.
In fact, you, as the parent, get to decide what is “first.” Certainly one might have more fun discussing the meaning of this or that gibberish than telling the story of the first correct word.
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